'Something may come through' dimensional 'doors' at LHC
Attack of the Hyperdimensional Juggernaut-Men
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A top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or "unknown unknowns" - for instance "an extra dimension".
"Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it," said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, briefing reporters including the Reg at CERN HQ earlier this week.
The LHC, built inside a 27-km circular subterranean tunnel deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, functions like a sort of orbital motorway for extremely high-speed hadrons - typically either protons or lead ions.
The differences are, firstly, that the streams of particles are moving at velocities within a whisker of light speed - such that each stream has as much energy in it as a normal car going at 1000mph. Secondly, the beams are arranged in such fashion that the two streams swerve through one another occasionally, which naturally results in huge numbers of incredibly violent head-on collisions.
These collisions are sufficiently violent that they are expected to briefly create conditions similar to those obtaining countless aeons ago, not long after the Big Bang, when the entire universe was still inconceivably small - it was smaller than a proton for quite some time, seemingly, still with all the stuff that nowadays makes up all the supra-enormity of space and galaxies and so forth packed in somehow.
Naturally, some extremely strange phenomena are to be expected when one mangles the very fabric of space-time itself in this fashion. Various eccentric nutballs have claimed that this would doom humanity in one fashion or another; perhaps converting the entire Earth, everything on it and possibly the rest of the universe too into "strangelet soup", monopole mulligatawny or some other sort of frightful sub-particulate blancmange or custard.
It has also been suggested that cack-handed boffins at the LHC might inadvertently call into being a miniature black hole and carelessly drop this into the centre of the Earth, rather irritatingly causing the planet to implode. It's certainly to be hoped that the button marked "Call Black Hole Into Being" on the control board has some kind of flip-down cover over it.
Obviously all that's utter rubbish. But some boffins have speculated that black holes might alternatively act as spacewarp wormhole portals into alternate universes, or something. This would seem to chime with Bertolucci's remarks this week on hyperdimensional "doors" out of which might come unspecified "somethings".
COMMENTS
Peas
Apparently, the beings on the other side of the portal know we are trying to open the gate and will help us test it, by first sending through a half bag of frozen peas. Higgs Bosons are peas.
Don't use gold nuclei in the LHC!
I liked the comments by Lee Dowling (6. XI, 13:18 GMT), saying that "There might be a big bang at the LHC in the conventional sense... but we aren't going to destroy the world accidentally," and by Peter McAuley (6. XI, 14:09 GMT), pointing out that we would need "18 orders of magnitude more energy..." And even then, with the Planck energy of E* = 1.956 x 10 exp. 16 erg or 2.177 x 10 exp. -5 grams or about 10 exp. 20 TeV in each particle, one would only create a few John Archibald Wheeler's "undressed electrons" or vacuum density fluctuations which are being formed everywhere spontaneously and vanish in Planck's unit of time T* = 1.616 x 10 exp. -33 second (cf. Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, "Gravitation," Freeman, .San Francisco, 1973, pp. 1190-1194). Even if the cosmon was such a vacuum density fluctuation, one would need 10 exp. 61 of them for the present mass of our universe, about 2 x 10 exp. 56 grams. Without inflation, the LHC, with an energy of up to 7 TeV, may at best produce a Higgs boson, not the higgsino or the particle for the unification of three basic forces of nature at 10 exp. 16 TeV (Alan H. Guth, "The Inflationary Universe," Perseus, Reading, MA, 1997, pp. 254-269). However, he also states that "a patch of false vacuum 10 exp. -26 cm across is all the recipe demands" for the creation of a "pocket universe" which, disconnecting from our universe "in roughly 10 exp. -37 seconds," would leave behind a black hole which would evaporate (by the Hawking process of pair creation) "in roughly 10 exp. -23 seconds, releasing the energy of a 500 kiloton nuclear explosion," about 17 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb in 1945. If the LHC could produce such a patch of false vacuum (and if the inflationary theory is right, as to increasing the initial energy many times by the inflation), then the prediction by Lee Dowling as to merely a local explosion would come true. Something like that also appears to be predicted by Michael Nostradamus ("Les Propheties...", Rosne, Lyon, 1557, verse IX-44) in Geneva, when a transmutation of elements is done there ("Saturn will transmute gold to iron") by that opposite to a positive ray (RAYON POSITIF, abbreviated to RAY POZ), followed by "extermination of all", in Old French: IX-44: "Migrez, migrez de Geneue trestous, Saturne d'or en fer se changera, Le contre RAYPOZ exterminera tous, Avant l'advent le Ciel signes fera." Mentioning Saturn connects this prediction to his verse IV-67 which specifies that this will happen in "the air very parched, by a long trajectory", when Saturn and Mars will be equally fiery", at the time when they are in a conjunction; "by secret fires, a great place will be scorched.". The next time when the closest conjunction of Saturn and Mars will take place is July 31, 2010 at 0 degrees 0 minutes 50 arc seconds in Libra, almost ideally on the cusp of Virgo and Libra (N. F. Michelsen, "The American Ephemeris," Astro, San Diego, CA, 1982, cf. positions of planets in July 2010). Nostradamus wrote, in Old French: IV-67: L'an que Saturne & Mars egaux combust, L'air fort seiche, long trajection; Par feux secrets, d'ardeur grand lieu adust, Peu pluye, vent chaud, guerres, incursions." The two verses are also connected by the equal numerology of their numbers (since 9 + 4 + 4 = 17 and 4 + 6 + 7 = 17; this method is often used by Nostradamus to connect verses with a similar content, about the same event). But the disaster is predicted to be only local, since one will be able to escape just by leaving Geneva in time (IX-44). Up to now now the rays of positively charged protons accelerated in opposite directions ("Le contre RAY POZ") and lead nuclei have been used in accelerators and planned for the LHC, but gold nuclei have been used to make new superheavy elements. According to the prophecy IX-44, all one has to do in order to avoid this fairly local disaster in Geneva is to avoid using gold as a target as well as accelerated gold nuclei!
You earthbound beings amuse me
Why is it that you always wish to define the unknown in terms of your greatest fears?
What has happened to the adventurer in you?

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